Atheists are always trying to disturb the serenity of Christians with their impertinent, impious questions: If God loves humanity, why is He planning to destroy the world and send the bulk of it to Hell? Why do you believe in Jesus but not Santa Claus? If God is all-powerful, can He make a burrito too spicy for Him to eat? Yadda yadda yadda. If the faithful weren't so armored in, well, faith, it might even be annoying.
And it's not that the faithful don't have answers to these questions; good answers, satisfying answers, unanswerable answers... Well, at last good, satisfying and unanswerable as far as they're concerned. After all, when you've had 2,000 years to think about questions like these, it would almost be a miracle if you couldn't think of something. And speaking of miracles, we're going to be looking at a Christian answer to an atheist question about faith-healing:
If God heals the body through faith, why don't we ever see really unequivocal miracles like God replacing an amputee's missing limb?
Sigh... just like us annoying atheists to ask for stupid things like extraordinary evidence to back up extraordinary claims. As it happens though, Christians have evidence that God has miraculously replaced amputee's missing limbs many times and it comes from a variety of unimpeachable* sources like medieval chronicles and the lives of saints. These are all gathered together in one of my favorite books, A Dictionary of Miracles.
A Dictionary of Miracles by the Reverend Ebenezar Cobham Brewer (a 1901 compendium of everything fantastical in Christian dogma), provides me with the same kind of entertainment as Bullfinch's Mythology does. Both have stories about jaw-droppingly wild happenings that occur when gods intervene in the world of humankind. The only difference is that a story like Leda and the Swan, where the god Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce and impregnate the maiden Leda, is regarded as a charming fairytale because no one (or almost no one) believes in the Greek gods anymore... but a similar story where Jehovah, in the form of a Holy Ghost, impregnates the Virgin Mary, is believed without question by millions.
I find this credulity fascinating because of the kind of mental gymnastics people have to go through to believe what common sense and experience should tell them is unbelievable. I also find it alarming because, as the philosopher Voltaire (1694 - 1778) said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
This is one essay in a series I call "Faith: Plucking Out the Eye of Reason" (you can find links to other entries about miracles involving spit, babies, cats, etc., at the bottom of the page). If faith is a virtue rather than license to believe absurdities presented as profundities, then it can withstand a look at some of the evidence the faithful provide as justification for it.
So here, without further ado, is some of the evidence the faithful provide to prove that God has replaced amputated limbs in the past and could again if He felt like it.
Like many other miracles, this kind is based on biblical accounts of Jesus healing cripples, as in Luke 6:6-11. There's no specific description of him replacing amputated limbs but the saints who came afterwards never let that limit them.
Take the case of St. Augustine (CE 354-430), for instance. An official of the city of Carthage had part of his leg removed when a sore turned gangrenous and the surgeon was preparing to cut off the rest of it to prevent the further spread of the infection when "St. Augustine prayed, and the leg was not only instantly healed, but even the amputated part was restored" (A Dictionary of Miracles).
Of course, that was only part of a leg that had been cut off. St. Anthony of Padua (CE 1195-1231)'s miracle left St. Augustine's in the dust:
A man in the confessional told St. Anthony of Padua that he had kicked his mother; whereupon the saint said to him sharply, "the foot that could kick one's mother ought to be cut off." The man on his return home actually cut off his foot. When St. Anthony was told thereof, he ordered the maimed man to be brought to him, and, making the sign of the cross on the maimed limb, the foot was restored to him (Ibid., quoting from The Lives of the Saints, Edward Kinesman, 1623).
Unfortunately, there seems to be a little confusion here since the exact same story is told about St. Peter of Verona (CE 1206-1252).
Sometimes you don't even need prayer to accomplish a little miracle-healing. St. Attalus (CE 627) reattached a severed thumb using spit and St. Francis of Paula (CE 1416-1507) grew two eyes and a mouth on a baby born without them... also with spit.
Then there's the "Miracle of Calanda" which supposedly took place in Calanda, Spain in CE 1640. Miguel Juan Pellicier, a farm laborer, had a leg amputated after a cart ran over it and it became gangrenous. Three years later, after rubbing the stump with holy oil and dreaming of being within the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Pillar, he awoke to find his leg miraculously restored. A great deal has been made in the last decade about all the evidence that supports this claim for a miracle and you can read the pros and cons of the argument in the entry on Wikipedia.
As far as I know, Calanda is the most recent case of spontaneous regrowth of an amputated limb on record... if it's actually true. If such a miracle happened and was documented in more modern times, it would make headlines all over the world. One has to question what makes the world of 2011 so different from that of 1640 and earlier? Is God less interested in amputees now? Are amputees all less faithful? Or does it have something to do with better record-keeping and higher standards of evidence? Or is it something else?
What do you think?
Other entries in the "Faith: Plucking Out the Eye of Reason" series:
St. Nicholas: Of cats and catamites (Part 1)
St. Nicholas: Of cats and catamites (Part 2)
If you don't believe in miracles then you don't know spit!
Mummery at the nunnery in the Middle Ages!
Out of the mouths of babes…miracles!
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*You must have faith, my child. Believe they are unimpeachable sources and they will be. Also, wear the ruby slippers, click your heels while saying "there's no place like home" three times and then you'll be in Kansas... or possibly somewhere else in the Bible Belt.
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